Do more research yourself, starting with a physics book, and and you'll understand why it's not a problem. Your child won't benefit from superstition.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779867 and marked it off-topic.
In general, I believe that advocacy of the precautionary principle belongs on other sites, and I'm very surprised that you and the rest of the YC staff don't agree.
Where, precisely, did I do that? The most abrasive thing I said -- arguably the only abrasive thing I said -- was "Superstition won't help your child." Out of curiosity, if I had said that in response to someone posting an antivaccination viewpoint, would you have called me on the carpet for it?
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
I suppose the system may impose a rate limit after a certain number of downvoted posts. If so, I've never encountered it before, even in threads where I've taken many more downvotes than I have in this one. That makes me wonder if you replied to me and then manually flagged my account to stall the conversation.
That would be pretty objectionable, if so.
But then again, who cares when its other people, amiright?
EDIT: I'm not some ignorant bumpkin. I've worked with physicists to do data taking for a detector at the LHC. I have a solid fundamental understanding of physics.
Is it wrong to be cautious when hundreds of millions of people could be effected by a new technology with little to no oversight, no resources for them in the event its discovered there are health effects, and little to no benefit for the actual process?
For fuck sake, Jon Stewart had to literally badger congressional representatives on camera to provide funding to first responders who are dying from cancer and other aliments from responding to the WTC on 9/11. I'm supposed to have faith the US government is going to make things right if body scanners are causing health issues? Fuck. no.
What are your thoughts on E=hv?
That sounds like a terrible use of time for both of us.
"However, other radiation authorities, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Energy Agency recommend against using ionizing radiation on certain populations like pregnant women and children"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner
So it just depends on who you think has authority. Presumably the people from the institute did in fact read a physics book at some point in their career.
It's not your child. You get to decide for your children and he gets to decide for his. If we all had to go and study physics in order to decide whether or not a certain risk is worth taking or not the whole circus would grind to a halt. We'd all be making maximally informed decisions - once we finished studying. And even then, after studying that physics book he might conclude it still isn't safe.
Terahertz scanners don't expose the subject to ionizing radiation. Airplanes, on the other hand...
You get to decide for your children and he gets to decide for his.
He's entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
Though on big and modern airports you will likely only see millimeter waves scanners.
Agreed that flying high in an airplane will give you an extra dose regardless, but that still does not mean that people do not get to make their own choices in things like these, if only for their mental comfort, no matter how misguided by the laws of physics that may be.
For an encore: people get to choose to be religious, even if there is no physics proof that a god exists and so on. People will base their decisions on all kinds of reasoning, some rational, others not so rational. Trying to reduce everything to a physics problem isn't going to get you very far.
And you think that the lowest-bid contractor who wrote the software for the porno scanners is of higher quality. Your optimism is cute.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416066/how-terahertz-wa...
It's pretty easy to damage DNA molecules in vitro, just as it's easy to kill cancer cells when they're not attached to people. In living tissue, the more alarming RF exposure studies all seem to be very difficult to reproduce. In any case, on a milliwatts-per-square-meter basis, the exposure levels used in airport security theater are very low compared to what tends to be used in studies.
Note that I'm not defending the use of these scanners, only their mechanism of action.